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Season One: Marvel hits refresh

It had to happen. The Ultimates universe was not enough. Yahoo has the article about Marvel.

Albeit it, it is not a complete reboot to the characters and the history, just contemporary additions added on to their origins.

From the article:

Marvel Comics is updating the origin of the Fantastic Four this week in a sleeker tale dubbed "Season One" with a more contemporary vibe, while sticking to the roots of Reed Richards, Sue Storm, brother Johnny, and Ben Grimm, otherwise known for the past 51 years as Mr. Fantastic, Invisible Woman, the Human Torch and the Thing.

Think tablet PCs instead of room-sized computing machines.

The revision is part of Marvel's push to add modern touches to its characters. Marvel also is bringing a modern spin to the origins of its other classic characters this year in similar "Season One" editions, including Daredevil, Spider-Man and the X-Men.

I'll say it once, I'll say it again. I get that you need to add contemporary, relevant material so that new and younger readers can latch on to the characters and the qualities that we love in these heroes (and villains), but it's feels like taking all that rich history (good and bad) and seeing them flush it down the commode.

We'll see how this "refresh" is handled when the books come out, as some reviews are already being posted.

They've always done this, really, just not in a "branded" way. Extremis was basically this for Iron Man, and Cap gets it every few years just because you have to keep moving the year he's thawed out.

I think a silent retcon in their own titles is the better way to go about it, since they're going to have to do it again in 10 years or so anyway, when these "Season One" books will more or less be outmoded.

...but superhero comics have always had a flexible 'canon'? It strikes me like complaining about the lack of 'continuity' in Doctor Who or Star Trek- best to assume there is none, or very little, and roll with it. Or ignore it and stay with the canon from (certain time period), if you prefer it! That's half the fun, imo.

Shit like this always reminds me of how when I was six I'd go over to my friend Adil's house and we'd come up with these hugely awesome elaborate games we were gonna play that required like all of our action figures and half of the couch cushions and three cardboard boxes and fourteen shoeboxes and the Ghostbusters proton pack and Adil's glasses and then three hours later his mom would be like TIME TO GO HOME and we'd never actually play the actual fucking game.

Don't care, Roberto writes the absolute best Fantastic Four this side of Waid and Hickman, he can reboot the franchise three times a year if he likes to. I swear, some people wouldn't recognize good comics if they bludgeoned them to death with a bag full of Eisners.

I don't know whats more sillier, that they're actually trying to pitch premise with something like "Think tablet PCs instead of room-sized computing machine", like just re-telling the whole story we all know, only with iPhones added or replacing guns with Walkie Talkies, is going to make things better, (but if "52" taught us, promotional ads lie) or the fact they're actually calling a comic book arc a "season". A comic BOOK series called a SEASON... that's the best they came up with?

The problem is that you can't have both continuity and a sliding timescale. The most you can do is to look at the older stories and say "ok, something similar to that happened to the current characters." The Fantastic Four might have gone into space, but they didn't do it to be the Russians to the moon. (though if they're updating the origin, I would like to see Reed building a rocket in his backyard and telling the others that in the mid 90s, and the others humoring him because they think he's insane.) Reed and Ben didn't fight in World War 2. Peter Parker didn't go to his college classes wearing a jacket and tie, not to mention a canary yellow vest, and how did Flash Thompson meet Sha Shan? He got lost from his unit in Iraq and wandered into Vietnam? The best thing to have done if they were going to take continuity seriously would have been to age the characters in real time, but while that might have made for good comics, it would have been lousy branding.

I don't get why they're including Daredevil in this project. His backstory is as follows: pushed old guy out of the way of a truck, got radioactive stuff dumped on him, went blind & developed powers, went to law school, dad was killed by mobsters. Does any of this really need to be "updated?"

But tablets are still basically toys when it comes to computing, any serious scientist would be using at least a desktop or if it's anything heavy-duty then they'd be begging for funding to get time on a supercomputer. Checking email? Updating your status on Facebook? Playing Angry Birds? Then you do it on a tablet. It's essentially a smartphone with a very large screen.

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